Respiration of a patient with an emergency respirator becomes necessary, in general, when disturbances develop in spontaneous respiration. The persons to be respirated are usually in a building, such as private homes or public buildings, but, of course, also outside buildings, e.g., in an automobile on a road or on sidewalks. An emergency may be triggered, e.g., by a sudden myocardial infarction or an automobile accident or an accident at work. In any case, the patient must be treated on the site of the event and transported into an adequate medical facility for further treatment. This comprises first aid on site, transportation to a hospital, or even from one hospital to another hospital or within a hospital building.
Numerous emergency respirators are known in the state of the art. Emergency respirators are typically arranged on the wall of an ambulance, rescue helicopter or in a building, e.g., a hospital or physician's office, and can be brought to the site of the accident or to the person requiring respiration. For transportation, the devices can be mounted on a carrying system alone or together with their accessories, e.g., oxygen cylinder, breathing tubes, filters. Besides the breathing tube, the oxygen cylinder belongs to the necessary equipment that must always be carried along, because patients with disturbances of the cardiovascular system are always supplied with oxygen.
To make direct supply of the patient on the site of use possible, the supply devices must be transportable. However, the environment in which the patient is located may vary greatly. For example, the patient may be in a very crowded or poorly accessible environment, e.g., in an apartment in an old building, which can be reached only via narrow stairwells. Persons may also be trapped in a wrecked automobile after an automobile accident, or there is a situation in which accidents occur during mountain hikes and the patient is in a rather remote area. However, even if accessibility is guaranteed, the devices must be brought to the patient from the ambulance or the storage site and brought to the destination together with the patient after the first aid, in which case uneven road surfaces, slippery ground, high steps, narrow bends make rescue difficult.
During the transportation of the supply devices outside the ambulance, these devices are either carried or suspended, for example, at the patient stretcher with fastening means or simply placed beside the patient on the stretcher. Special mounts are also frequently provided to make it possible to fasten the fastening means on rails or on a stretcher. The emergency respirators can then be fastened in an ambulance to a wall mount directly or by means of the carrying system. Mounted in the wall mount, the devices are ready to operate.
Device-specific wall mounts are available for emergency respirators. The mounts are metal constructions, which are screwed flatly on the wall and to which the respective emergency respirators are fastened by means of rails and a snap mechanism. The snap mechanism is preferably located at the upper end and the rails at the lower end of the mount.
To arrange the carrying system on a mount, the carrying system is introduced at first from the top into a lower rail and then pressed against an upper end of the mount, so that the carrying system will then snap automatically into the snap mechanism and is held in the mount. To separate the carrying system from the mount, a human operator must hold the grip of the carrying system with one hand and release a lever of the snap mechanism with his other hand, so that the system can then be lifted obliquely upward and out of the rail or mount.
A certain arrangement in space of the emergency respirator, carrying system and accessories, including the oxygen cylinder, is determined by the mode of construction of the emergency respirator, carrying system and wall mount. The grip of the carrying system is in an upper position in this arrangement, the emergency respirator is located under it with user interfaces, such as a display and setting elements pointing forward or obliquely upward, and the pockets for flexible tubes and other accessories under it. The oxygen cylinder is in the lower position.
The respirators, which are prepared for transportation with an oxygen cylinder to the site of use, are mounted in a separate rack. The dimensioning of the rack is determined by the dimensions for a type of cylinder. Installation of a cylinder of a larger volume is often possible with difficulty only, if at all. The replacement of attached parts on the frame of the rack requires a tool and skilled manipulation with the hands. Especially disturbing is the rather non-ergonomic replacement of cylinders, which must be frequently performed. In case of some products, the carrying rack must be removed for this from its mount, clamped connections must be opened and the cylinder must be removed from the rack.
The carrying rack determines the dimensions and presets the possibility of carrying and fastening. Thus, a narrow and higher construction will be well suited for narrow bends (in homes or between automobiles), but it will increase the risk of striking a step in case of larger stairs and forces the carrier to exert great effort to hold the carrying rack high if he would like to avoid a fall or defect in the device. The uneven surface structures or overhanging tube connections increase the risk of getting caught in protruding structures, e.g., doorknobs. The uneven structures also make it difficult to clean the structure as a whole. The weight of the carrying rack itself increases the load for the carrier.